


Feeling a Tad Salty

by Milkbonez



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Akamatsu Kaede Lives, Alternate Universe, Blood, Gen, Kaede AU, Miu only gets a few lines though, Spoilers, my kaede au again, which really should be platonic oumaede au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 13:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19813483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milkbonez/pseuds/Milkbonez
Summary: After the conclusion of a seance conducted to hopefully find Angie's killer, a second body discovery announcement is made. Kaede and Shuichi work separately to cover more ground.





	Feeling a Tad Salty

**Author's Note:**

> Another year-old fic from 2018, this is actually the very first thing I wrote for my Kaede AU (Kaede and Shuichi both survive Ch 1; after losing everyone's trust, Kaede befriends Kokichi and works with him and the Training Duo throughout the game). This spoils the Ch 3 investigation specifically, and mentions the culprit of Ch 2. I'm not sure if I'll write much more for Kaede AU, but things may be retconned in the future if I have new ideas for it. For now, it is what it is.

The all-too-familiar _ding dong, dong ding_ sounded, and the overhead monitor switched on to show the three remaining Monokubs on their sofa. Sounding shaken, Monotaro remarked, “Who knew there would be… another body discovery in the middle of an investigation…?”

Who knew, indeed?

The next several minutes were a blur of activity. Monokuma appeared from nowhere, replacing the stone-silent “temp” copy of himself that had allowed the Monokubs to manage the students. Kaito, terrified of the possibility that Himiko had been murdered as part of a ghastly curse, excused himself from the investigation again. With a flash, Kiibo’s eyes emitted a blinding white glow, illuminating the windowless seance room.

Miu cackled. “Mwah-hahaha! I, Miu Iruma, have demonstrated my genius by installing in Kiibo this awesome new function! Shine on, you crazy fuckin’ diamond!”

Kokichi turned to face away from Kiibo’s light, pouting. “Maaan, what a lame function. You shoulda made him, like, a Transformer or something.”

Holding her right elbow, Kaede mustered the strength to speak. “Well, now that it’s light in here, we should start investigating while we can.” She managed to keep her voice from trembling, but her tone was subdued.

She heard Shuichi’s agreement from across a canyon as she made her way to the center of the ruined salt circle. Himiko lay curled up on the floor, hat crumpled beside her, blood pooling on the floor around her and smudged bright red across her cheek. She was still, so still. The longer Kaede stared at the body in front of her, the more her stomach twisted. Dead. Himiko really was dead. She had been alive and talking before the seance began, and now… It didn’t seem real.

The worst part was knowing that the culprit was among them. A student had done this. The thought sent an icy chill up the nape of her neck.

“Himiko…” she whispered, hugging herself tightly. “You didn’t deserve this.”

She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder. Looking up, she saw Shuichi, the concern he held in his eyes. Voice shaking, she muttered, “This n-never… gets any easier.”

“No, it doesn’t. Honestly, I don’t think it ought to,” he replied. “We shouldn’t get used to our friends being killed—”

“Even still,” cut in Maki, appearing between the two, “we don’t have a lot of time left. We have to start investigating Himiko’s death.” That said, she stepped forward and crouched beside the body to examine it. Her eyes never met Kaede’s.

“You’re right. Let’s get to work.” Shuichi gave Kaede a faint nod before he moved to join Maki.

Careful not to step in the blood, Kaede eased in close and stood over both of them, listening in to their commentary. Shuichi said, “It’s as the Monokuma File says. Her only wound is a stab wound to the back of her neck, just like Angie. This wound was fatal…”

“She never said anything after we began the seance,” Kaede mused. “She must have died instantly.”

“Not instantly, but soon enough,” Maki posited. “With a wound this deep, she would have been too shocked to do anything except bleed out.”

“…You’re speaking from experience?” Shuichi asked.

“Of course. Quick deaths are my specialty.” Her tone was not boastful, only matter-of-fact.

Kaede hugged herself again at the mental image of Himiko under the iron cage, unable to scream despite the pain of being stabbed. “H-How terrible…”

“Kaede.” Maki looked over her shoulder at her, red eyes set in a piercing glare. “You standing there isn’t all that helpful. Could you investigate elsewhere?”

Shuichi stiffened a bit. “Hey, Maki—”

Kaede shook her head at him. “No, she’s right, Shuichi. I’ll go.” She glimpsed his apologetic frown before she shuffled away, shoes crunching on the salt.

The white sheet that had covered the cage lay tossed aside not far from Himiko’s corpse. Kaede gave a few gentle tugs at its corners, spreading it flat. The center of the sheet blushed with blood spatter. Closing her eyes, she visualized what Himiko looked like during the seance, hunched over with her forehead down. If she were stabbed in the back of the neck… Then how would blood have sprayed _up_ against the sheet?

She leaned in to have a closer look. Aside from the spatter, the sheet was intact with no rips, no tears. Himiko could not have been stabbed through the sheet. Her heart beat faster, partly from excitement, partly from fear. “Ooh, this is an important clue!” she exclaimed under her breath. She had to tell Shuichi.

She looked up at the sleuthing pair again, Maki now pointing out something about the floor. Kaede’s excitement evaporated in that instant. If she tried to approach Shuichi with her findings, Maki would spit nails at her, probably. Huffing, she straightened up and strode towards where Kokichi paced on the other side of the room, a hand to his chin in thought.

Along the way, Miu hollered at her, “You’re the culprit, ain’t ya, dumpy tits?”

Kaede stared ahead, determined to ignore her.

“Not answering back, huh? A clear sign of guilt! Hahaha!” Miu’s voice drew the attention of the others in the room, Tsumugi, Korekiyo, Gonta. Even Kiibo seemed to turn his head a smidge in Kaede’s direction, shifting his light.

Kaede froze under the eyes of her classmates, and she turned to face Miu, brows furrowed. “What makes you think I did it?” she demanded, more roughly than she intended. She resisted the urge to wilt under their gazes.

“Duh-doy! The only time Himiko coulda been killed was during that dumbass seance,” explained Miu. “So all you fuckers who were involved in it are suspects.”

“Then why are you singling me out? Shuichi, Kokichi, and Kiyo were there, too.” Immediately, Kaede regretted her words in spite of the truth behind them.

Miu’s face split into a smug smile as she said, “’Cause deep within your sad, dumpy tits is where you’re hiding your bloodlust! That’s why you set up that trap last week in the library, isn’t it?”

That was a jab at a raw nerve. Kaede’s jaw clenched and hands tightened into fists even as her heart sank. Before she could argue, however, Kokichi piped up. “I mean, we established during that trial that she never used it. Riiight?”

Relaxing her hands, Kaede glanced back at Kokichi, hands on his hips, his face beaming disarmingly. He added, “I thought someone with such a golden brain would have remembered that _for sure_ , but there goes Miu, subverting expectations once again.”

“Eh?!”

His teasing revived some of Kaede’s confidence. Wearing her own smirk, she looked back to Miu and added, “I guess that brain is made of fool’s gold.”

Miu faltered, but she persisted in her aggression. “What’re you tryin’ to say, Kaediot?”

“I’m trying to say that you have no evidence to back up your accusation. Instead of standing around picking your nose, maybe you and your dog boobs should do some investigating yourself before you start pointing the blame at others.”

“Dog boobs?!” Miu cringed, her face scrunching up in a grimace as she looked down at her own chest. “D-Dog boobs…?”

When she reached Kokichi’s side, Kaede muttered, “Thanks for that… and I’m sorry I threw you under the bus.”

His leftover smile stretched, and his brows lowered in a more devious look. “I hope you have plans to apologize properly,” he purred, “or I’ll have to make you pay for that slip of the tongue.”

Taken off-guard, she winced ever so slightly, but then she quirked an eyebrow at him. Her unamused expression made his own light up again. “Aw, darn. I’ve made you too sharp. It’s no fun teasing you if you can see past my fibs.”

“You brought that on yourself.” A simper twitched at the corners of her lips.

“Anywho, I take it things went well with Shuichi and Maki.”

“No complaints at all,” sighed Kaede. “She immediately told me to go somewhere else, so I searched for my own evidence.”

“Oh? What’d you find? Anything juicy~?”

“Blood spatter on the white sheet, but no stab hole or anything… But I didn’t tell Shuichi because I figured he would find it himself. He’s the Ultimate Detective, after all.”

“No stab hole, huh…” Kokichi put a hand to his chin again, making slow steps towards the wall. “An interesting detail.”

“What about you? I came because I saw your wheels turning.”

“Well, I noticed this hole down here.” Popping a squat, he gestured to a hole created by rotting wood in the wall. “It looks like it goes to the empty room next to this one.”

She knelt down at his side. “Hey, you’re right! Check out the floor here, too. You can see the ends of these floorboards and the ones in the next room through the hole.”

“Scoot over, please?” He hooked his fingers underneath the edge of one floorboard and lifted it from its supporting crosspiece—easy enough since none of the boards were nailed down. Three feet of empty space dropped down to the dusty concrete below. The hole caused by rotting wood in the wall stretched down about a foot and a half below the boards.

Kokichi crooned, “ _Wood_ you look at that!”

Not sparing him even a glare, Kaede conjectured, “This hole looks big enough for someone to squeeze through.”

“I think it’s possible, if they were small or lean enough. But I don’t think it’s likely anyone could have gotten around under the floor during the seance. It was pitch dark, after all.”

“Still, if it’s _possible_ , we shouldn’t rule it out right away.”

“Fair point.” Replacing the floorboard, Kokichi straightened up, and the two walked out to the fourth-floor hallway. “There are still a couple of other things I want to have a look at which might be relevant to Himiko’s murder. Could you go grab that ‘Caged Dog Village’ document from Kiyo’s lab for me? I want to see the room on the other side of the hole.”

“Yep. Be right back!”

Kaede had answered with enthusiasm, but even a few steps from the seance room cloaked her in an eerie darkness. It swallowed up any trace of Kiibo’s light that reached outside the door. Unease perched on her shoulders the deeper she ventured. The only good thing about her errand was that Korekiyo’s lab was a short walk around the corner. It wouldn’t take long.

The door groaned when she pushed it open, announcing her arrival. There were a few real lights turned on in here, and windows between the bookcases in the upper floors welcomed the afternoon sunshine. It did little to banish her paranoia, however. Mere minutes ago she had been in here with Kiyo, who had spoken to her, Shuichi, and Kokichi with fervor about the customs of the remote Caged Dog Village, especially the Caged Child seance. Kaede didn’t believe in spirits, let alone speaking with them, but admittedly something inside her wondered, _What if?_ Was Angie’s ghost, and those of the other deceased, truly watching over them, longing to establish a connection and speak?

Poor Kaito. If this is how all the ghost talk was affecting her, it must have been twenty times worse for him.

She shook her head firmly, erasing that line of thought to pursue one related to the situation at hand. Two victims, Angie and Himiko, both stabbed through the neck. Angie was found in her own lab with both doors locked, murdered by the old katana taken from the glass case just a few feet from where Kaede stood. Shuichi (and Maki) would soon discover the weapon that took Himiko’s life. Stabbed downward, but in a way that sprayed her blood up against the white sheet…

Time was ticking away. She needed to take the book to Kokichi. Setting down her backpack, Kaede slid the aged, tattered book on the Caged Dog Village into her backpack beside her spare vest. That done, she turned and headed out of the Ultimate Anthropologist Lab, diving right back into her thoughts.

The culprit was among them, or perhaps there were two. It was always a hard pill to swallow. Kiyo was mysterious, creepy even, and he had a connection to both victims via the katana and the seance he prepared. But Miu had been correct: anyone present during the seance was a suspect, even if Kaede herself couldn’t believe either Kokichi or Shuichi would do it. Then again, she’d thought the same of Tenko and Kirumi… The pool of possible perpetrators widened if the hole in the rotten wall and the space under the floor were the vital clues they appeared to be.

There was a white heap on the floor in front of the empty rooms. When she came close enough to identify its shape, Kaede’s heart rate jumped a hundredfold. “Kokichi!” Running up, she threw herself onto her knees at his side. Seeing the red staining the floor near his forehead, her stomach roiled. “No, please, no…”

His head sprang up, revealing a very typical Kokichi smile amid the several streams of blood running down from his forehead. “It’s a lie!”

Her jaw dropped. Half a minute of stunned silence passed before she could say, “…I don’t know whether to smack you or cry in relief. This was all for a _joke_?”

“N-No, this is… real blood.” Tears glinted in his eyes when he opened them, his grin straining into a grimace.

“Here, can you stand up?” Taking his hand, Kaede pulled him to his feet and coaxed him to sit against the wall. Mind racing, she placed a hand on his bangs. Kokichi winced. “Sorry. What happened?”

“I was searching for clues in that empty room… when my foot fell through one of, one of the floorboards. I went down, the board came up… After I got my bearings, I left, but my balance was off… I lay down so I didn’t hit my head again.” One of the corners of his mouth perked up. “That’s when I got the idea for my scare.”

As he talked, Kaede removed the vest from her backpack, glancing from it to the wound on Kokichi’s head and back again. After a moment’s hesitation, she placed it over his head. “Wait, how did you step through the floorboard?”

“There was no crosspiece supporting it, I guess… _Ow_!” He flinched under her hand when she pressed down on his wound.

“Ah! Sorry. Hold this to your head. I’ll go look for some first aid supplies in the warehouse.”

“Wait!” he barked just as she stood. Digging the document out of her backpack, he looked up at her with eyes gleaming and said, “Thank you, Kaede.”

Taken aback by his genuineness, she flashed a smile before she flew through the dark hallway to the stairs. She could feel time slipping out of her grasp each step she went down.

Once on the ground floor, she thrust open the door to the warehouse, chest heaving. As expansive as the gym, the ceiling loomed overhead, reaching down with ivy vines. On either side of the door were metal shelves—probably hundreds, stacked floor to ceiling—stretching all the way to the opposite wall, armed to the teeth with boxes and boxes of items. Where would she even begin to look?

“I have to start somewhere.” She marched forward and inspected the shelves nearest her. Up and down she scanned the labels of the boxes within her reach, heart drumming hard, anxious of how limited her time was. She couldn’t determine a system for how things were organized; her search was essentially blind.

 _Ding dong, bing bong!_ The television screen mounted up on a shelf near the door flicked on to show Monokuma in his chair, holding a glass of champagne. “Confidence. Dreams. That’s what the killing game is all about!”

With a growl of frustration, Kaede burst out of the warehouse and hustled across the building to the restrooms. Monokuma’s voice echoed from a few screens set up in the hallway. “Killing game fans, hold your head high and watch with your own two eyes!”

She nabbed a handful of paper towels and dampened them under the sink tap. There was even a screen in the bathroom. “Baseball! Soccer! Mobile games! They’re all nothing compared to the killing game!”

His influence hovered around her as she charged back up the stairs. “The killing game just can’t be beat! Behold, students, the entrance to the trial grounds!”

Escape from him was impossible. For now, at least.

She arrived at the fourth floor hallway to find Maki and Shuichi squatting front of Kokichi, who was seated right where she left him. “I’m back!” she announced, moving in next to Shuichi.

“Here she is! Kaede, you’re a lifesaver,” Kokichi sang. He took the damp paper towels and used one to wipe the blood from his face. “I was just telling these two my findings, which… isn’t much. Basically, it looks like Kiyo followed all the instructions perfectly… He used all the proper tools in the proper order and f-followed all the steps just right.” He placed the last few paper towels on his wound and pressed down with the vest.

“No wonder he’s so dejected about it failing,” Shuichi remarked.

Kaede injected, “Now that you mention it, it’s more than a little strange that he seems more worried about that than about the murder.”

Around them, their classmates trickled out of the seance room and towards the stairs. Shuichi glanced up at them before he asked, “Kokichi, could I bring this document to the class trial? There may be something else in here that proves useful.”

“Y-Yeah, knock yourself out. Actually, don’t… I can tell you first-hand it’s not fun, heehee.”

Standing up straight, Maki scoffed. “Tch. We need to get to the trial grounds.”

Taking the book from Kokichi, Shuichi asked, “Should we wait up for you both?”

Kaede shook her head. “It’s okay, we’ll catch up.” She resisted the urge to flick her eyes in Maki’s direction.

“Alright. See you there.” With Kiyo’s document in hand, Shuichi and Maki followed the flow of the other students.

“Can you get up?” Kaede asked her companion.  


“Yeah.” One hand keeping pressure on his head, Kokichi took her hand and climbed to his feet. He took a few tentative steps, his body swaying.

“Careful.” She pulled his arm across her shoulders, letting him balance against her when needed. They eased downstairs together, Kokichi feeling more comfortable walking on his own after each flight. “By the way, did you mention to Shuichi about how you hit your head?”

“Yuppers! First thing I said when they came over asking what happened. They accused me of joking around when I told them, though. He was especially concerned with seeing your vest on my head.”

“I’m sure, but… to be fair, it can be hard to tell when you’re joking sometimes.”

“Really?” Kokichi seemed truly surprised. “But you can figure it out, and Shuichi is pretty sharp.”

Kaede shrugged one shoulder. “Your jokes tend to be poorly-timed. Like a few minutes ago when I thought you were dead.”

He beamed at her. “Hey, now, a little humor is necessary in these trying times!”

“We’re in a killing game, Kokichi. That’s in pretty bad taste. And besides that, your lies make it hard to tell when you’re being serious, too. You’re tough to pin down.”

“I’ve told you before, it’s because I’m subtle. I don’t want to attract too much attention to myself even though we both want to end the killing game.”

She pursed her lips at him, pointing out, “Lying about being the culprit isn’t exactly helping anything in that regard.”

“Like I said, humor is necessary in these times.” His smile seemed more strained; it had fallen away from his eyes. Kaede almost missed it.

They made it to the first floor. Kokichi balled up her vest and held it out to her. “Here, do you want this back? I’m gonna go wash my hands in the bathroom before we get to the trial grounds.”

Taking care not to touch his blood, she took it. “That’s a good idea. I can throw this in my dirty hamper and wash my hands in my dorm bathroom. Meet you at the trial grounds!”

They went their separate ways, with Kaede jogging towards the dorm building. There was only one thing to do now: work with the rest of her classmates to find the truth. If they could survive this trial, they would win themselves more time. More time for Kaede and Kokichi to figure out the identity of the mastermind. More time for her to devise an escape plan. More time for her to get back in everyone’s good graces, first and foremost. They needed cooperation if they were going to beat Monokuma.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote this for the sole purpose of getting someone to help Kokichi with his head wound in Ch 3, but I wanted to provide framework for it, so I started it halfway through the investigation instead to establish Kaede's relationship with Kokichi, Shuichi, and Maki, as well as hinting at how the rest of the class feels about her.
> 
> Because I didn't make this clear in the narrative: Kokichi and Kaede are both distrustful of Maki because of her talent. Maki resents this, and because Kaede chooses to ally herself with Kokichi, she distrusts them both. Kaede is still friendly with Shuichi as well as Kaito, but Maki's presence keeps her away from them. (Shuichi, at this point, is also distrustful of Maki, but because Kaito believes in her and Shuichi is his bro, he is making an effort to get along with her.)
> 
> And in case you missed it, it was implied that Tenko was executed earlier as Rantaro's killer.


End file.
